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public health
Warning of Superbugs, Groups Urge Trump EPA to Ban Use of Important Drugs as Pesticides
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops," one expert said, calling out industry for the "recklessness and preventable suffering."
Nov 24, 2025
Just a month after the head of the World Health Organization warned that "antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," a coalition of conservation, farmworker, and public health groups on Monday petitioned the Trump administration to ban the use of crucial drugs as pesticides.
The legal petition provides a list of "active ingredients that are themselves, or whose use can promote cross-resistance to, medically important antibiotics/antifungals," and requests that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancel registrations under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of all products that contain them.
"Research is clear that the use of antibiotics and antifungals as pesticides poses a threat to public health because it contributes to the evolution of pathogens that are resistant to medicine," the petition states, referring to what are often called "superbugs."
"Petitioners make this request because of the critical nature of these drugs and drug classes to human and veterinary medicine, along with scientifically established concerns related to increasing resistance and declining efficacy rates as a result of prophylactic and other uses of these antimicrobials outside of the medical field," the filing continues.
"More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths."
Noting that the use of antibiotic pesticides also "directly threatens the well-being of humans and animals through contamination of food supplies and crops," the filing adds that "petitioners believe that the most effective way to safeguard human and environmental health is to disallow the use of these ingredients in pesticide products."
The petitioners are the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, Californians for Pesticide Reform, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, CRLA Foundation, Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education, and US Public Interest Research Group.
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. "This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA's pesticide-approval process."
Donley and other campaigners have previously called out the Trump administration for spouting pesticide companies' talking points in the September Make America Healthy Again report, installing an ex-industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, and doubling down on herbicides including dicamba and atrazine—the latter of which is commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States, and last week was labeled probably carcinogenic to humans by a WHO agency.
Underscoring the urgent need for EPA action, the new petition highlights that "more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths," according to a 2019 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Citing another CDC report, the filing points out that "the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the issue due to longer hospital stays and increased inappropriate antibiotic use, leading to an upsurge in the number of bacterial antibiotic-resistant hospital-onset infections by 20%."
Globally, antimicrobial resistance "has increased in 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored for global temporal trends between 2018 and 2023, with annual relative increases ranging from 5% to 15%," according to the WHO analysis released last month. By the end of that period, "approximately 1 in 6 laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that "we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests."
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'Absurd Yet Predictable': US Close to Losing Measles Elimination Status Under RFK Jr.
"The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists," said one physician.
Nov 21, 2025
US public health officials warned this week that the country is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to the vaccine-averse policies and practices of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials have linked the ongoing measles outbreak in Arizona and Utah with the major outbreak in Texas that began in January, both of which are being caused by the same viral subtype. With no signs of slowing, and holiday travel and gatherings fast approaching, experts worry that measles transmission could escalate and the disease will no longer be considered eliminated.
Under World Health Organization guidance, "eliminated" means an absence of endemic virus transmission for 12 months or longer in a defined geographical area under a well-performing surveillance system.
Many public health experts blame the administration of President Donald Trump—and particularly Kennedy's policies—for the measles resurgence. Kennedy, who initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak, has endorsed vaccines, but has also made unsupported or misleading claims about the safety and efficacy of measles shots.
"Absurd yet predictable," Dr. Michael O'Brien, an urgent care pediatrician, wrote Thursday on X. "The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists. As measles approaches endemic status in the US for the first time since 2000, the CDC has abandoned science and reason."
The anti-vaccination movement is largely to blame for the continuing measles outbreak and the fact that the U.S. is going to lose our measles elimination status. Until RFK Jr. is removed from office, things are only going to get worse. @jimalwine.bsky.social and I wrote about here:
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— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 2:18 PM
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. However, with 1,753 confirmed cases and three deaths in 45 reported outbreaks so far this year, experts say the US is at risk of following Canada, which announced earlier this month that it has lost its elimination status, which it enjoyed since 1998.
As in the US, experts attribute Canada's measles backsliding to declining vaccination rates, mis- and disinformation, and vaccine aversion—especially among religious groups. The West Texas outbreak began in the close-knit, unvaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County, while the Arizona/Utah outbreak originated among members of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot.
More than 9 in 10 reported US measles cases this year are among people who have either not been vaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Writing for LiveScience, University of Pennsylvania molecular virologist James Alwine and University of Arizona professor emerita and epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs warned Wednesday that measles is "a bellwether of declining vaccination rates—a wailing siren that other vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are just around the corner."
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic," Alwine and Jacobs asserted. "The movement is responsible for undermining trust in scientists and vaccines via a tsunami of misinformation coming from social media accounts and podcast appearances."
The authors continued:
This was made worse when Senate Republicans confirmed Kennedy as secretary of HHS, despite the objections of tens of thousands of scientists, healthcare providers, and public health practitioners. Kennedy is an avowed anti-vaccination proponent who chaired Children's Health Defense, an organization that regularly promotes vaccine misinformation. He is also a conspiracy theorist and has claimed that Covid-19 is a "bioweapon" engineered to "attack Caucasians and Black people" while sparing Ashkenazi Jews; that WiFi causes brain cancer; and that drug use, not HIV, causes AIDS. His appointment opened the door to install anti-vaccine proponents as leaders in public health, such as replacing the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with several individuals with links to the anti-vaccine movement. In confirming Kennedy, Senate Republicans utterly failed the people of the US and demonstrated a cavalier disregard for decades of scientific achievement.
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an investigation into Kennedy's ACIP purge. The following month, six major US medical organizations sued Kennedy, alleging his vaccine policies are placing children at grave and immediate risk.
"As the anti-vaccine movement continues to be nurtured by Kennedy and his followers, this threat will only continue to expand and grow more severe," Alwine and Jacobs warned. "Removing state vaccine requirements for school entry—as has happened in Florida—is demonstrative of this, and represents an unacceptable risk."
"Kennedy must be removed from office," they added, echoing a September demand by more than 1,000 current and former HHS officials. "There can be no improvements in public health or vaccination rates as long as he continues his destructive reign."
In September, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy, declaring that he "has violated his oath of office and proven himself unfit to serve the American people."
Advocacy groups and medical organizations have gathered more than 150,000 petition signatures calling for Kennedy's removal.
On Friday, Congresswoman Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), who chairs the Democratic Doctors Caucus, led 65 colleagues demanding that Kennedy "immediately correct" the CDC website "after it was updated to promote the widely disproven and dangerous claim that vaccines may cause autism."
"RFK Jr.’s decision to spread fringe conspiracy theories and misinformation on the CDC’s official website is reckless," Schrier said in a statement. "He’s scaring parents, undermining trust in the CDC, and putting children at risk.”
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Groups Warn Trump Executive Orders Would Spike Cancers Caused by Exposure to Nuclear Radiation
A letter implored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power."
Nov 14, 2025
A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people's "suffering as the price of nuclear expansion," said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.
More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC's Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.
"NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level," reads the letter.
In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC "roundly rejected" a petition "to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year."
The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.
"Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.
"Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls "face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood."
Despite the risks to some of the country's most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of "the basis of the NRC regulation," reads Friday's letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.
The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump's executive orders calls for "an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not 'count' or be considered as to have not occurred."
The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are "based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer," reads the letter. "The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure."
Trump's orders "would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model," it adds.
The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on "Reference Man"—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.
“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies," reads the letter. "Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that "radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
The groups emphasized that "executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act."
Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, "should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests."
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